Arthritis of the Spine
Arthritis of the spine has many of the same symptoms as arthritis of the other joints. However, because the spinal cord is the major nerve conduit of the body, arthritis here can cause additional problems that you don't see in the smaller joints. First, let's talk about the anatomy of the spine. Your spine is made up of vertebrae (bones) that are separated by discs (a fibrous cushion with a gel core). Running down the back of the vertebrae is your spinal cord, and coming out between each vertebrae are spinal nerves. These nerves go everywhere in your body and transmit the signals coming from your brain.
With arthritis of the spine, the discs dry out and lose some of their cushioning ability. You can see in the pictures above how that decreases the size of the holes that the nerves exit out of. It also puts more stress on the bones. When that happens a few things start to go wrong. First, the bones feel unstable so they start to lay down more calcium in order to protect themselves. That calcium eventually becomes bone spurs. In a very advanced case, the spurs of two adjacent vertebrae may grow towards each other and try to "fuse" together to add stability to the spine. As the discs dry out and the arthritis of the spine gets worse, they become thinner and weaker, and eventually the gel core may "herniate" or leak out. This can put pressure directly on the spinal cord causing symptoms anywhere below that spinal segment (depending on what part of the cord is touched) or it can put pressure on the spinal nerves. In the neck, symptoms might include numbness or tingling in the arms or hands or pain in the shoulder, arms, or hands. In the low back, there might be pain in the hip, buttock or thigh or sciatic pain running down the leg to the foot. At this point, there is no cure for the patient. The damage has been done, and all we can do is manage the arthritis of the spine and its symptoms. A medical doctor would probably recommend anti-inflammatories and pain relievers to the patient to start, or maybe physical therapy. Depending on the success of those, the next step may be injections into the spine to decrease pain and inflammation. In severe cases, surgery might be recommended to remove part of the bone (a laminectomy) or fuse the vertebrae together to stabilize them. A chiropractor would recommend a different approach for arthritis of the spine. In my office I recommend chiropractic adjustments (and I have gentle, low force techniques for patients with severe pain and deterioration or bone density loss), infrared laser therapy, and home stretches. Remember how the discs don't have their own blood supply? By adjusting the spine, we put movement back into that joint which allows it to absorb nutrients better. In my opinion, a chiropractor is the ideal arthritis doctor because we allow the joints to get nutrients without the harmful side effects of the drugs that mask pain. The infrared laser (which has been cleared by the FDA to treat arthritis pain) speeds healing by increasing blood supply (blood carries ALL the nutrients to the tissues) and speeding up the metabolism at a cellular level (think of metabolism as the eating and breathing of a cell). In effect, it just makes the healing process faster, with the added bonus of decreasing pain signals to the brain!
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If you have arthritis in the neck and suffer from neck pain, here is a well written article that explains all of the things that may be causing it. Click here to see the information on
